Distinguished Physician 2011
JOHN GEORGE GOLFINOS was born in New York, NY on July 2, 1962 of parents who had emigrated from Greece. His father was a cardiologist. John went to the Trinity School on the Upper West Side, which his children attend and where he now serves as a trustee. In high school, he was a National Merit Scholar and received awards in competitions in Latin translation as well as co-captaining the soccer and lacrosse teams. He went to Princeton University, majored in biology and played four years of rugby, serving as an officer in his final year. He continued to play rugby throughout medical school at Columbia. The team reached the national championship for graduate schools in his second year and there lost to Georgia Chiropractic College. With the encouragement of Dr.
Bennett Stein, he accepted a residency position at the
Barrow Neurological under Robert Spetzler and completed his training in 1995. This included a year learning molecular biology in the glioma laboratories of Adrienne Scheck and Joan Shapiro.
Dr. Golfinos returned to New York to join the Department of Neurosurgery at New York University led by Patrick Kelly. Serving in the tumor division as assistant professor, his early clinical research was on low-grade gliomas and image-guided neurosurgery.
He was the founder and co-director of the first Gamma Knife Radiosurgery suite in New York City. With both radiosurgical and microsurgical skull base training, he collaborated with colleagues in otolaryngology to specialize in vestibular schwannomas, neurofibromatosis Type 2, and other skull base pathologies while still maintaining a general neuro-oncologic surgical practice. In 2005 he was awarded promotion and tenure. In 2008, he was co-founder with J. Thomas Roland of the neurofibromatosis center at NYU. In that year, for his work with patients with neurofibromatosis type II, he was awarded the Children’s Humanitarian Award by the Children’s Tumor Foundation. In 2009, he became Associate Professor and Chairman of the department after the retirement of Dr. Kelly.
Dr. Golfinos’ clinical interests and practice are limited to brain tumors and skull base tumors, especially in patients with neurofibromatosis Type II. His current research interests include MRI tracking of single cells in glioma and metastatic melanoma as well as clinical outcomes of radiosurgery for brain metastases. He continues to investigate outcomes of both microsurgery and radiosurgery for vestibular schwannomas. In 2010, Dr. Golfinos became the President of the New York Society for Neurosurgery.
Dr. Golfinos and his wife, Stephanie, have three children – Jason, Chloë and Phoebe. Outside of medicine, Dr. Golfinos devotes time to his family, tennis, and piano. He participates in the New York Oenological Society which, mirabile dictu, also counts three other members of the Society of Neurological Surgeons in its ranks. The three Golfinos children are all still in secondary school. Only one has mentioned a career in neurosurgery.
which under his leadership ranked as one of the top 50 in the nation.
Throughout his career, Dr. Rigas has been a clinically active academic gastroeneterogist, providing care to patiets, teaching fellows and residents, and conducting clinical studies. He also co-authored with his Yale teacher Howard Spiro, one of the fathers of American gastroenterology, the very popular textbook Clinical Gastroenteology that was tanslated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguesse.
Dr. Rigas is recognized as a leading investigator in cancer prevention. He was the first to identify the mechanism by which NSAIDs prevent colon and other human cancers and made several more seminal observations in the field of cancer chemoprevention. His current research is focused on the development of novel anticancer strategies. He is the inventor of a new class of compounds for the prevention and treatment of cancer, some of which are about to enter clinical testing. He has also invented a new agent for the control of inflammatory bowel diseases, currently in pre-clincal development. In addition, he was the first to apply infrared spectroscopy to the study of cells and tissues and established its potential in cancer diagnosis; a new method for the rapid diagnosis of cancer based on his work is expected to be available within a year. For these and other contributions, he holds numerous patents.
Dr. Rigas was the founding CEO of Euroclinic, a private hospital in Athens, Greece.
He has also served or serves on the boards of several companies in the US and abroad.
He is married to Dr. Anastasia Rigas, a pediatric gastroenterologist, and they have a son, Jason, a recent Oxford graduate. In his spare time, he enjoys history and the study of Byzantine frescoes using infrared spectroscopy.
Dr. Basil Rigas is Professor of Medicine and the William and Jane Knapp Professor of Pharmacology at Stony Brook University Medical School, where he also serves as Vice
President for Business Development, Dean for Clinical Affairs, and Director of Cancer Prevention.
Dr. Rigas received his MD and DSc, both with the highest honors, from the University of Athens. He trained in internal medicine at Brown University, in biochemistry in the Graduate Department of Biochemistry of Brandeis University, and in gastroenterology at Yale University. He held faculty positions at Cornell University, Rockefeller University, the American Health Foundation, and Stony Brook University. At Stony Brook University, he was until recently the Chief of the Division of Gastroenterology,
Distinguished Physician 2012
